


Onset

by Outside_Context_Problem



Series: The Troll War [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, F/M, First Contact (the concept not the Star Trek movie), Humans are actually pretty good at technology!, M/M, Spaaaaaaaaaace, War, sci-fi fanfic backed up by at least 5 minutes of wikipedia reading per concept!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 03:56:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Outside_Context_Problem/pseuds/Outside_Context_Problem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a semi-unified humanity encounters trolls for the first time, John and Dave are space pilots, I am terrible with descriptive and narrative text, so there will be a lot of dialogue, and I steal blatantly from "Enemy Mine", "Darmok" (TNG), and pretty much the last two seasons of DS9. Oh, and there will be relationships and characters not flagged yet. I mean, you make an AU, you might as well drag in reinterpretations of the whole cast to fit your own personal preferences, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You are CAPTAIN John Egbert

You are John Egbert.  
CAPTAIN John Egbert - okay, technically you're not, because the International Space Service doesn't have that rank and you're listed as John Egbert-A2(c) - but that c stands for commanding, and when you command the ship you are CAPTAIN JOHN EGBERT. The other half the time, when Dave Strider-A2(c) is commanding, you call yourself the captain anyway because Dave doesn't care (and you know he secretly wants you to, so he can be the cool rebel against authority. While still being the authority.)

You (co-)command a small but proud and useful vessel, the Hermes-class explorer, the _I.S.S. Genesis Tracker_. Dave calls it the _Trashy Goatfucker_ when he's on shift (reversing the initials is a 1.5x Irony Bonus, 2.5x if he's upside-down on an EVA when he says it), which is one of the many reasons you're glad your job does not involve much contact with other people.

Besides Dave, that is. A Hermes-class has only two internal divisions - cockpit and the tangled mess that is maintenance, laboratory, dormitory, robot storage, and cargo hold. There's not a lot of room for privacy.  
Which is why it's great that you got assigned with your best friend from the academy! Which is something Dave bitches about a lot but seriously, coming from Captain Irony (which is Dave's actual rank, you have decided), that's actually kinda heartwarming.  
You both agree (actually agree, not _"Hey Dave, I bet checking out that pulsar will be fun!" "Yes John stars the autosats analyzed thirty years ago sure are wonderful, they must be miracles or something they are so exciting"_ ) that they really should've gone with a third crewmember. Not in this space, dear god no, but with a three-chamber design or something. Having only eight hours of overlapped being awake between the two of you every "day" feels like it is just asking for trouble.  
Occasionally it is also just asking for pranks but it's really not your fault if Dave forgot to set the seals on his pod and you managed to get a rubber glove filled with warm water on his hand. It's also not really your fault there aren't any laundromats on board.

It's your shift, somewhere in the 11th hour. The time when it gets reaaaaaaaally boring, still an hour or so before Dave gets up to join you for a while, and you are just running through diagnostics and course corrections for the 12th time this shift just to have something to do. Not that you really need to - you spend most of your solo shifts watching old vids, and you know Dave spends them making music, comics, and projected-light porn using the terrible terrible puppets his bro gave him as a graduation present. You're pretty sure most of his sales of the smuppet porn have been to haunted houses and horror film studios, and that they're only really selling because they're packaged with his phenomenal background music. Which is probably the point, it being Dave, and the use of the puppets being some kind of super-irony game he's playing with his bro that's so sharp it would cut anyone else.  
But sometimes the videos have to wait, because you have to make sure everything's running okay. Your dad taught you that, and since he is an astrophysicist (and not actually a Cape Canaveral street performer, like you had believed as a kid), following his advice is probably always the best thing to do.  
And it's a good thing too, because that's not a sensor anomaly!  
Kinetic inductance is pinging... tracking mobile object - it just changed course! And wow, that is a lot of gamma ray emission...

Aliens. Aliens aliens aliens.

"Dave! Dave! Get the fuck up!"

"Jesus, Egbert, what? If this is another fucking constellation that looks like a dick from this perspective, I'm going to smack you unconscious for your next sleep cycle."

"Dave it is a fucking alien spaceship I am not shitting you get up here!"

"John, take a goddamn breath before you collapse over whatever radioactive meteor you've found thi-"  
Dave collapses coming out of his pod, stumbles to his feet and squeezes into the cockpit next to you. While you filled out over the years (until you were almost taking growth inhibition hormones to still qualify for the ISS), he stayed as lanky as ever, so it's not that tight a squeeze.

"Madre de dios."  
The official languages of the Confederation of the Americas are English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Quechua, but most Yankees still only speak English. Texas and most of the Southwest are an exception, but you're pretty sure the only Spanish Dave really knows is enough to swear, order drinks, and hit on Latin women.

"That thing is a goddamn mobile object leaking all kinds of unnatural radiation, alright. Do we have visual?"

"Putting it together. We only have a couple angles right now, it's like a jigsaw..."

"Attaboy, John, work the puzzle." He claps you on the shoulder and switches on the external displays. "Starting up the Sagan Protocols."

"Got it! Picture coming up."

You both stare silently at the image, your mouth slightly agape (and Rebel Badass Dave Strider is a bit stunned too). The ship is wide and concave, concentric and coaxial curved spines jutting forward from a central base. It has a faint resemblance to a claw.  
It's also a bright purple, with haphazard rainbow splashing across the forward arcs of the spines.

"Is that accurate?"

"Uh, yep. Wavelengths are all correct. We... made contact with clown aliens?"

"John this is not a shitty B-vid, the spectrum has to mean something in their culture. Besides looking like the Pride Flag. No response to our transmissions yet."

"Maybe they're deciphering- wait, they've launched something. Small enough to be individuals or single-person vehicles..."

"John. John, those are chemical-reaction engines. They just fired missiles at us!"

"No way! That is so cliche!"

"Critique later, move now! They are inbound, accelerating at 30 m/s2."

You slip your hands into the manual controls, and yank your baby into the sharpest curve you can get. "Strap in, Dave, I'm going for Gliese 581 e."

"God, I hope you know what you're doing, Egbert."

"I probably don't!"

"Why the fuck would you even say that?"

"Dad taught me to be honest!"  
Dave just growls, probably because badass rebels don't engage in shouting matches to cover their sheer terror (unless there is an attractive president's daughter nearby).

"Entering atmosphere."

"No shit!"

You would shrug, but that would screw with the manual controls something fierce. You just grin. "At least we get a beautiful place to die."

Dave glares through the cockpit's sole legitimate, open-to-space narrow viewport, at the roiling sea of blue cloudy atmosphere, streaked by the friction flames of your descent. "Yeah. Real pretty." He looks down at his console, closes his eyes and clenches his hands. "Proximity alert. One kilometer."

You lean forward, even though it doesn't really do anything. You're at maximum velocity in this medium anyway. You grit your teeth. There's always a way out. You're not sure if you said that out loud right now or just thought it.  
"Been nice knowing you, Egbert."


	2. You are Dave Strider-2A(c)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave gets technical, I get philosophical, climatologists, geologists, and meteorologists get to scoff at my wiki-gleaned and half-remembered Physics 101 science.

"You are a fucking god of air."

You are Dave Strider-A2(c), definitely not the captain of the _ISS Trashy Goatfucker_ , and you award yourself extra irony points for that line. Your annoying/best friend John Egbert-A2(c) has just steered you through the atmosphere of an unknown planet to a safe landing despite having half the reaction thrusters blown out from alien death missiles. He's also struggling to suck in breath right now. Double meaning, double score.  
You give him a nice light pat on the back and unstrap. "Holler at me when you disconnect your nerves from the ship, okay? I'm going to damage-assess."

You take one step, then another, steadying yourself on the chair and console grips. "Feels like oh-seven, oh-eight g. This rock is a little above Earth-mass, right? Maybe it has some kinda funky-ass core. Hey, John, you know anything about the composition? John. John. Mr.-93%-In-Planetary-Formation-class."

"Nnnng."

"Fine, take a couple breaths. Let's see how fucked we are."

It takes more than six months in a zero/micro-gravity environment to make Dave Strider unsteady on his feet. Plus, you are like a goddamn EVA ninja, the amount of time you spend out on external repairs. There's no reason to waste reaction mass when you can haul yourself down the hull, and you are certain you could basically tear apart bulkheads with your arms by now. Even if they are skinnier than the massive biceps attached to John's gigantic upper body. Which you do not look at when he's asleep, at all. And his bulk is purely genetic anyway.  
You are definitely not grumbling when you walk towards the back of the ship, mostly tossing yourself from support bar to support bar. Any resemblance to brachiation is strictly for ironic ape-man purposes. "Aw fuck me. John, the fucking hull damage killed our Faraday cage. Everything without independent shielding is fucking haywire, this rock is almost as magnetic as me."

"Probably got... weird... core."

"Fuck yeah, I rule at guessing. How's the atmosphere looking on sensors?"

"There's... an atmosphere."

"Wait. That shit ain't right, is it."

"Fuck... no. We're way, way too close... to Glie-"

"Don't say the whole thing dumpass, focus on breathing. Right, so there's an atmosphere here when there shouldn't be. The gravity's too light for the mass. The magnetosphere is bizarre as all hell. Anything else? Gigantic alien pyramids, planet-sized rocket engines, stargates?"

John doesn't have a response, so you take a look at the external atmospheric sensors and wait for a reading. Tolerable, a little too much argon and too light on oxygen for long-term survival, but you have limited O2 scrubbers in your suit. Which you're wearing, of course. Who the fuck would join a space service that didn't have a vacuum-worthy standard uniform? And it looks stylish as hell, especially if the shirt's ripped up and you have a cut on your jaw. This is a key element to career selection.

"I'm going to check the exterior. If you hear me screaming and dying slowly, well, you're fucked, John."

"Thanks, Dave." 

You hop into the airlock, settle onto your feet, testing your strength and balance. Dubstep muzak plays while the airlock depressurizes, a hazard created during a poorly planned Yankee cultural music period, and kept because it discourages John from doing Extra Vehicular Activity. And that shit is yours, all yours.

When you push out of the lock into the void it's almost silent, just your own breath, the friction of the outer suit against the liner. Time is... different when you're out there. Easier. You get things done, and then you... wait. And you watch the lights from behind your faceplate, and you close your eyes, and you think you can hear the music of the spheres.  
You make some of your best mixes after EVA work, which may be because, as John says "All great artists are crazy anyway, Dave, you're just the cool kind of crazy".

Gliese 581 e is looking noticeably less peaceful and inspiring than deep space. The airlock's porthole is already caked in frost, and then you decide you don't actually give a fuck and pop the hatch.  
The first gust nearly slams you against the inner airlock door. You maintain a hold on the outer door with both hands and go almost horizontal for at least ten, nah, twenty seconds. Then the wind subsides - momentarily.  
That's a starter's gun if you ever heard one (or imagined it in your head. Same difference). You sprint out, visor flickering between infrared/visible light/ultraviolet and getting jack shit from any of them thanks to this fucking snowstorm getting entirely in your business. Why you are plunging into this is a question for you to review later, along with exactly how sane you are, and would it really have been such a bad idea to skip your space dreams, drop out of college, and go DJ in a shitty club in Jersey or somewhere?  
You spin right, skidding a lot but not falling, staying right next to the ship, which is a giant beautiful sun in the IR spectrum, although it's shedding atmospheric entry heat into this monster of a weather system pretty fast.  
When the next thundering blast of wind comes, you're ready for it, your multitool clamped solidly around one of the extended wing pistons. It still takes you off your feet, and your gyros and pressure sensors give a wildly fluctuating reading of 200-300 km/h windspeed for a ten second burst. You measure twenty six seconds until the next blast, although you'd stopped running after ten, switching the multitool to a hull-piercing spike - with an intended use known only to god and whatever intergovernmental agency blessedly overengineered every single thing the ISS uses - and jammed that sucker a good meter into the ground. When that windstorm (avg 265 km/h, duration 13 seconds) ended, you sprinted for the engines, ducking into the still cooling melted rock they'd formed on your impact (still 170 C but bless that uniform/EVA suit). The wind (same pattern, you stopped counting, John can analyze all that crap, you're sure he'll love it) sweeps over your ship, catching you only on its edges, and your crouched position, suit-minimized cross-section, and magboots (which should not be doing anything, unless the planetary surface is a magnetic substance, right?) keep you from turning into a flying monkey without needing to grab onto anything. You stay in roughly that position for each of the 33 blasts that follow, while you inspect the non-buried parts of your ship. Then, taking the same precautions, you head back towards the airlock - and pause.

_15 seconds to next burst._

_10 seconds._

_5._

**BURST. ******

You're nearly ripped backward, and for the thousandth time in the last fifteen minutes, you give private fistbumps to everyone involved in the design of your uniform and integrated EVA suit, because the suit holds together and none of your limbs break and - for whatever still unfathomable reason - your boots maintain a magnetic lock strong enough to hold you to the ground.  
You go inside before the next blast. You've had enough time.


	3. John: Prepare. Assess. Sacrifice. Be awesome.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leaving space-home is hard. It's hard and nobody understands.

You are John Egbert-A2(c) and you. Are. **AWESOME**.

You cannot believe you just did that. In fact, even after getting your breath back you are still stunned for several minutes at the sheer spectacular FUN that piloting a damaged Hermes-class through an alien atmosphere to a safe landing ended up being.  
Then you unstrap, shake your arms around to get the pins-and-needles sensation out of your nerves (they don't like being overwritten by a direct connection to ship systems - especially when those systems get hit by alien missiles!), and check the internal systems status, since Dave's still out.

The asynchronous merger of music designed by cavemen to be boring combined with music designed by slightly less ancient cavemen to be irritating lets you know Dave's in the airlock. You're too engrossed to look up from the pile of robots you've been testing, which is fine, because Dave heads for the cockpit anyway.

"By the way it's colder than your last girlfriend out there, and I'm pretty sure the windspeed could take you around the world in a couple hours."

You pry out another power unit, throw it in the significantly larger "fused beyond repair" heap, then blink, pause, and stand up, smacking your head hard on shelving.  
Rubbing your forehead and imagining cartoon stars of pain orbiting it, you catch Dave's eye contact. Probably. He hasn't taken off his visor display, of course.  
"It's cold?"

"Yes, John. Cold, as in the absence of heat. Believed by primitive man to be a force or element of its own, cold is actually simply a relative measurement, comparing the given temperature to that of other-"  
You interrupt Dave's faux lecture before he can really get into the gesticulations involved in mimicking his favorite professor.

"Dave, this planet is ten times closer to its star than Mercury. Even if it has enough of a magnetic field to hold an atmosphere-"  
He almost interrupts you there, leaning forward in his chair and opening his mouth, but you silence him with an angrily pointed finger. Nobody stops John Egbert from listing the facts! "-the tidal heating from Gliese 581 should make this place more volcanic than the tons of very engaging sex I had in my last relationship."  
You have successfully riposted an irony assault on your romantic history! Right? That joke totally worked.

Dave keeps staring at you - okay he's pulled the visor down and is staring over the rim now you totally fucked up your counter-ironies.

Dang.

"Okay. I have some pretty fucking convincing empirical evidence right outside the door that "volcanic" is about as accurate a description of this rock as "good" is an accurate description of your taste in vids."

Oh he did not just go there. Okay, shit, he did. You are going to...  
You're going to take it, because Dave is your Coolguy Rebel With A Heart Of Gold buddy and he does this constantly.

"Okay, planet's crazy, I'll add it to the list. Good thing we're not going outside much."

Dave chews on his words for a couple minutes, while you find a second working robot power pack and stack it with the first. "Except that we have to."

"Um. Dave?"

"Our landing was throwing up enough heat to liquify the rock we landed in. Like I said, though, 's fucking freezing out there, so our ship is now what you might technically call buried. Encased. Part of the landscape. It is an ex-star ship."  
It is total bullshit when Dave steals your classic comedy routines and does them badly at that! He's just getting back at you for the attempted ironic coolguy sex joke, you know it.

"So we take the hull-breaker picks to it and dig us out?"

Badass rebels don't shake their heads, so Dave just stares at you over his visor again. "So we activate the emergency beacon and hunker down. Main engines are so fried that we're more likely to create a black hole than escape this planet's gravity."

"Dave, you're being ridiculous. Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to form a singularity-"

"Yes, dumpass, which is why I used that comparison! The _Trashy Goatfucker's_ shot."

" _Genesis Tracker_ ," you mutter. "Wait. Dave, we can't stay here. As soon as we hit the beacon, well, as soon as the beacon satellite gets up, we'll get a lot of attention."

"That would be the point of a distress beacon, Egbert."

"Dave, you know who's a lot closer than any of the other ISS scouts? Those aliens that shot us!"

"... Hijo de puta. Dammit, John, this isn't even in the handbooks or training. You know the deal, you're the shining scion and all, and I get to be the improvisational master. I should have remembered that."

"I like old sci-fi vids more than you do," you shrug. Dave walks across the cabin to punch you.

"Okay, so we can't stay here. We still have to launch that beacon or we're fucked anyway. So two questions for you, atmospheric genius. Can we even get the satellite into orbit, and can we hide if the aliens decide to probe the surface?"

"Hmmm. The satellite should be okay, the gravitic constants will be enough to keep it oriented until it's in orbit... the atmosphere is doing some wild things to just about every communication mode we have, though. Downside, we won't be able to get any kind of constant readings or feedback from it. Upside, unless the aliens have some kind of so-advanced-it's-magic sensors they won't have any more luck locating us."

Dave ponders this. "Do they have so-advanced-it's-magic sensors?"

"Well, A: we're not dead, B: they were using chemical reaction missiles. These guys are Klingons, not Organians."  
Dave's face is utterly blank. Then he hits you again.

Ignoring that, you nod at your robot complement. "They got hit pretty hard. I've got the intact parts for two Hazardous Location Bot, or one and a Repair Assistance Remote."

"Go with one of each. I'll grab the pre-hab and the reaction pistols."

"Get the flare guns too. And as much of the pellet rations as you can."

"Bluh. I feel like a fucking hamster eating those."

"Better than a skeleton. Although you're already pretty close, Slim."

Dave can't spare time from sorting through the lockers to hit you, so that just gets you flipped off.

It takes a while to sort out everything that's portable and functional, review Dave's environmental data, try to figure out why the magboots work so well on the planetary surface at least three times before deciding "Fuck! Crazy planet science magic, whatever", and set the distress satellite launch on a thirty minute delay.

It doesn't feel too long before you're standing in the airlock, listening to Dave's shitty ironic joke music, prepared to abandon your ship.  
Wow. This actually really sucks. You know you're not a real captain but still. Leaving the _Genesis Tracker_ behind really, really hurts.

At the last minute, standing outside and waiting for the wind to try and rip you off your feet, you yank out an emergency marker (black, but it glows like hell in UV), and scrawl on the hull.

"John? Done fucking around?"

"Just had to set something straight. Let's roll, Dave."

In thirty second spurts you leg it across a rounded, rocky landscape, which would be covered in snow if the wind would ever let the frozen water sit still for a minute.  
You leave behind you the _ISS Genesis Tracker_ , with a reminder and a warning

**I'LL BE BACK FOR MY SHIP  
-CAPTAIN JOHN EGBERT.**


	4. You are a multiple-viewpoint narrative

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Dave have different views on things. Except caves. Everyone knows caves are awesome.

You have had more pleasant runs. Actually, you have also had less pleasant runs, because ISS training was still para-military (almost thirty years after becoming entirely independent of the Confederation of the Americas Aerospace Force that spawned it), and being a smart-ass rebel got you lap after lap in freezing rain and sweltering heat alike, and without the benefit of the EVA external suit you have now.  
Still, you never had to lock yourself to the planet to keep from being smacked around worse than a child abuse joke you don't have the spare attention span to think of right now.

"Five." John's scratchy, barely-audible radio broadcast drags your mind back to the now. The average time between hurricane-level wind bursts is 28.7 seconds. You're stopping every 20 seconds, just to be certain.

You get a couple more hammering strides out then maglock, crouching to make it easier.

You've been doing this for three hours and eleven minutes now.

It keeps happening.

"John. Is something different up ahead?"

"Uhmmmmm. Yes!" There's a second or two after the bursts of wind where things are a little bit clearer, and your illuminators can bounce light a couple dozen meters ahead instead of one. "There's a hole."

"Cave. Shelter. Fucking run."

John doesn't have the energy to tease you for your limited vocabulary. He only has enough breath to sprint, hurling with you into the dark.

 

You pull yourself to your feet and tilt your head, trying to find Dave. He's still slumped against the floor in a half-crouch, half-collapse.  
"Dave? Buddy? You alive? I could really use something to spice up these ration pills. If you don't want me to eat you, say something."

After a few moments a raspy voice scratches across the radio. "You fuckin' had your chance to eat me in college."

You play along, because badass rebels can only respond to genuine concern with a facade of anger. "I dunno Dave, dating you again vs cannibalism... it seems like a tough choice. I gotta lean towards cannibalism."

"Touching as the thought of you devouring my corpse to keep up your energy is, don't you have some protocols to slavishly follow first?"

You sigh theatrically. "Oh fine. I guess the consumption of human flesh can wait until we actually run out of food in-" You check your hastily-scrawled inventory list. "378 days. But I'm putting a reminder on my calendar the day after that: Devour Dave's delicious mesquite-barbecue-flavored meats."

You get a light chuckle out of him as he drags himself up using the cave walls. Comedy stores successfully refueled! That took a while. Dave is such a stony audience. It's nice when you can actually get through to him.

"So... where the fuck are we?"

"Well, it looks like a cave."

Dave performs his usual response.

"There's a drop up here," you comment, after completely ignoring him (seriously, who punches somebody in a vacuum suit? There wasn't a single chance of you feeling that) and walking deeper in. "Looks like ten, fifteen meters?"

"Cool. We got this."

You turn around to see Dave unstrapping the repair-bot from his back. He waves impatiently for you to do the same. You detach the hazard bot and wait for him to explain.

"Flying time."

"Uh. Dave, the engines on these bots can only support them, plus maybe thirty kilos. Not even you are that skinny."

"Shut up, meat machine. We're not actually flying, we're just gonna glide down. Between the low grav and the bot propulsion we ought to be going slow enough to avoid getting fucked up."

"Um. Well, if you're sure..."

Dave looks up at you as his bot activates, the vaguely cylindrical body shifting up into the air. "I'm never even the slightest bit sure about any of my badass plans, Egbert, and I'm insulted you would suggest I should be."  
He grabs his bot, gloves locked to its frame magnetically, and jumps.

You think about this. You spend some considerable time thinking about this. You spend enough time that you work out how to reconfigure the shape of the EM field your boot maglock makes, tie the field regulator to a kinetic control (note you should get Dave to write control software for this later), and test it by repelling yourself off the cavern floor about ten centimeters.

That's the plan, anyway. You end up getting tossed a meter in the air and landing on your ass, then having the shift in field dynamics lock you to the floor.

Aw dammit. You love boots that can make you fly. These just need more work. You tweak the field control a little (read: turn down the sensitivity about 90%), test it again and... fuck yeah you are floating! It's wobbly and keeping your balance takes a bit of work... Got it!  
It's go time! Geez, Dave must be getting annoyed by now.

You jump off the edge.

 

Holy fuck why is John being such a dick. You landed just fine and you are perfectly intact and fuck this you're not going to stand around with your thumb up your ass while Egbert works up the mangrit to take the plunge.

The lower chamber is larger and a hell of a lot more interesting. External temperature is only reading at 283 K, there's a pool of liquid water stretching out to one side, and - you walk over to check - there's cave paintings.  
Or something. Cave scratchings. A lot of hash marks, like they'd do in every old prison flick, and a really poorly-drawn, jagged mess of what looks to be a map of the cave system, with numerous portions scratched out for sheer awful, leading to a tangled mess of arrows pointing to updated sections outside the map itself.

Finally, you hear footsteps and turn around. "Hey John, check this shit out-"

The person now entirely up in your grill is not John. John is not 30 cm shorter than you or wearing some kind of ragged brown robe, and most importantly, John is not holding a curving blade that has to be monomolecular sharpness to your neck, just pressing into your suit collar.

The person - creature - person - barks and snarls something at you in a clicking, hissing, growling language.

You have no idea what the fuck to say to this guy, so you say nothing. This does not seem to calm him, and he pushes the blade a little further towards some pretty important arteries and veins.

Then a shadow flashes behind him, falling with a speed that should make some kind of noise when it hits, but there's nothing but silence, and - a multitool configured into a hammer clocks him in the back of the head, and he falls, slumping backwards.

The hood falls away to reveal a disturbingly human face, albeit one that's ash grey, has a mouth filled with shark teeth, and has two candy-corn nubs like horns on the top of its head.

"Hey, Dave! Sorry, I had to set up my own method, I don't trust the hazard bot's levitators right now." John says this, of course, while hovering half a meter off the floor, feet shifting to balance like he's standing on ice.  
"Who's this douchebag?"


	5. Both of you: Be the alien

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cultural misunderstandings are most dangerous when the other guy has claws.

You are Karkat Vantas. You're fucking lucky to be alive, considering the immense amount of hoofbeast shit you have had to metaphorically plunge your nose and swim through. Like being assigned a shitty-ass menial job at the alterforming facility on a planet so hopelessly unimportant it doesn't even have a fucking name yet, entirely due to your fucking spectrumist superiors and your refusal to reveal your blood color.

And then of course you have to get cut while working on the machinery, in full fucking view of everyone else, and it is just lucky you booked it before any of them could react, because you made it out the door two seconds ahead of security, a brutal interrogation, and by all likelihood a quick and unargued culling.

But you escaped. Into a planet that won't be habitable for at least a sweep (a real sweep, not the useless three-day orbits of this shitty rock).

The fact that a breathable atmosphere existed and a few vital lichens and worms had already been seeded was just enough to keep you alive.

That and you refuse. To. Die.

So when they sent some kind of weirdass drone into your cave, a big armored black-shelled thing with glaring, blinding searchlights, you jumped the grubfucker, because you will not die lying down under their feet.  
Then things went black. And now everything hurts.

"Fuck my head." You wake up the way you normally do - eyes snapping open instantly, teeth gritting, going from zero to furious in no time.

You very much know you're awake, so you have to be hallucinating.

What you thought was a drone has removed its head, only to have a pink face like a badly-formed troll underneath, with no horns and light yellow hair. It's crouched over you, holding what looks like an arm-length bar with a blade a little longer stretching out of one end. The eyes are concealed behind a thin band of red, a particularly accusatory shade of red.  
Then you see the other one, also black-suited, head (helmet, fuckass) removed. Pale pinkish skin, two center flat teeth just visible through a closed mouth, properly black hair, but cool blue eyes.

You're a nooksniffing moron. Drones? What the fuck was Past You thinking. He's some kind of paranoid ignorant moron.

Fuck.

Aliens.

If there is one fucking thing to convince you the universe hates you in particular, that you were spawned for no goddamn reason except to suffer, it would have to be surviving being killed by your own people for being a freak to be killed by aliens for being a troll.

Fuckit. Your scything blade is gone, and you know what, it would be good to die as a troll. Instead of a fucking mutant-blooded freak.

 

 

The little alien guy doesn't look that nasty to you, really. He's got some sharp little teeth, sure, but it's just like a mouth full of incisors. And he's all lean and corded muscle under those robes. 

Not that you looked that much or anything. You just made sure he wasn't dead after you gave him a hammer to the head, and that he wasn't hiding any more weapons.  
Dave was the one who grossly violated privacy to peek in the guy's pants to "check out his freaky alien genitals", and even worse he won't share any details.

At first you were afraid you were going to have to keep Dave from killing him - there was Actual. Visible. Anger. On his face. But he calmed you down pretty quickly.  
"I'm not stupid, John. He's wearing a fucking burlap sack, I don't think he's working with the spaceship that tried to kill us. I can forgive him for jumping me, we're in his cave. And believe it or not I'm here because I kinda care about our whole exploration mission. Killing the first alien we meet would leave a bad impression."

Of course, that doesn't keep him from waiting over the guy, with his multitool on the "cutting" setting, in a crouched pose that resembles a very patient vulture.

You hope your calm, straight pose (no giant grin, as much as you want to, displaying teeth doesn't work well with any other species on your planet, let alone aliens), head tilted inquisitively, might help calm him down after seeing the Angel of ~~Death~~ Dave.

You don't think it does. He just growls something theatrically, staring at you with bright red-irised eyes, then slumps back in a position of surrender.

You have to. You absolutely, positively have to do this it will be SO awesome.

You get down on one knee, grab his hand in a firm Buddy Grip, and help haul him to his feet.

This would have worked better if he actually grabbed back and stood dramatically, teeth gritted at the sheer power of your manly friendship - or did anything but limply lie there, staring at you in angry confusion. It's okay, alien guy is really tiny, you can just - whoa, he must be a lot more dense than he looks. What're his muscles made of, lead? - you still manage to haul him up, because hey, it's .78 g and you are a guy who lifted food refrigeration units to work up his mangrit in order to qualify for the ISS physical (you still aren't sure why Dad had you lift refrigerators instead of a weight set or something, but he is really, really smart, so you did it. And it worked!).

He stands grudgingly, like the only reason he doesn't succumb to gravity is an irritating obligation to you.

Fuck that. You are John Egbert and you are not going to let something puny like a sulking alien mood get in the way of FIRST CONTACT.  
You point at yourself with one thumb. "Hi. I'm John Egbert." You jab both thumbs at your recalcitrant companion. "This jackoff is Dave Strider." You give the names particular emphasis, since, really, how is an alien going to know what's a noun in English anyway?

Dave stretches and casually flicks his multitool off, withdrawing the blade in a not terribly friendly gesture. You can tell he was going for "it can come back out just as fast".

The alien gapes at you for a minute, grumbles something and runs his fingers (which are capped with sharp yellow claws) through his hair, especially tracing the little striped horn-nubs. Then he growls, in a -mockery- imitation of your tone, "Karkat Vantas."

You grin. Closed lips, no teeth. Okay slight buck teeth, they're not as bad as when you were a kid but they're never going to entirely go away. But no incisors. No threat. "Hi, Karkat."

"Chredk tsschac rggrrug Jhon hrvarn."

"I think he's talking shit about your mom, dude."

"I don't have a mom, Dave, it would be silly for him to do so."

Dave lowers his visor to glare at you, because obviously aliens would know you're a genetic experiment. Of course, when he does that, he shows his crimson-irised eyes (which he owes to also being a genetic experiment) to the alien.

Who is suddenly a blur, slamming into you shoulder-first, although he hits your upper chest, claws scraping for your face and unable to get around your suit collar.

You pivot, dropping a leg, and hurl. Dense but short, low center of gravity, hard to toss. You drop into a low stance and flex your hands, eager for him to come again. This time he feints left, slides right, then kicks off, slamming into you with enough raw inertia to take you off your feet. This time his claws find purchase on your cheeks - and come away soaked with red. You don't let that phase you (not now, too much adrenaline). You need to finish this strife - so you roll him, leaning forward with all your weight to spin him onto his back - then slam on your altered magboots at full power, going into a wildly uncontrolled spin.  
The two of you hit the ground, bounce, you cut power, bounce again, hit the wall. Between your uniform, EVA exterior cover, and keeping Karkat between you and the rock most of the time, you're more or less alright. You look down to find he pretty much is, too. Man, he is dense.

He's also stunned. Staring at your face, at his bloodsoaked claws.

In the sudden silence, Dave's footsteps ring like hammers. He pops the blade out of the multitool - then stabs.

It goes in about two centimeters from Karkat's face and penetrates at least a half-meter into the rock, easily.

"No fucking with my buddy." There is no more emotion than ever in his voice.

You step back, pop one of your gauntlets off and reach for your upper chest - the boxy shape of the emergency chemical applicator. It mixes a few basic components, and you dip your glove in the clotting, analgesic disinfectant, smearing it over your face.

Then, armored gauntlet off, skintight glove painted with your own blood, you walk over to Karkat - and offer him your hand again.

He takes it - and if the grip that meets yours is strong, it's not bone-crushing. He stands a little higher, a little steadier. He looks up at you - then runs a hand through the back of his hair, where you clocked him one with the hammer. It comes out splattered in sticky, darkening red.

Karkat holds his hand out. You shake it. You stop being able to tell what's his blood and what's yours.

"Vid cliches 1, legitimate xenopsychology speculation 0," you inform the world with a not-undue smirk.

Dave rolls his eyes - and tosses something at Karkat. The alien's hand is a blur as he grabs it - his weapon. Obviously the product of an advanced civilization - looks like a black polymer grip, monomolecular blade - but it's still basically a sword. What kind of advanced civilizations use swords (Klingons. Who called it? Oh yeah, John Egbert, that's who)?

He looks between the two of you, and for a moment his brow is furrowed in confusion (or anger?). Then he turns and starts walking deeper into the caves.

When you don't follow immediately, he turns around and snaps, "Hrgeth traac nraan, Jhon-Dhav."

Karkat Vantas is an alien badly in need of relaxation, you decide.

 

 

Apparently you are suicidal. Or maybe your blood has gone rotten, and you're finally going insane. You know if you were a rust-blood you'd be feeling middle aged by now, even venerable.  
But Red Eyes and Blue Eyes, Red Blood (Fine. "Dhav" and "Jhon") are following you towards your shitty excuse for a respite block, towards your meager stash of food, towards all you have on this rock, and it's because you invited them.

You just fucking assumed. Blue eyes, and then the other one took off his visor, and they were red-irised, bright red, your red, and all you could see was another highblood and another poor freak. And you didn't know if the "Dhav" servant/slave would fight back or defend his master and you didn't care, you just had to die for the insane equalist ideas you (and only you) think are just.

But then Jhon's blood was the same color.

 ~~And he pummeled you. Thrashed, really. It was kind of shameful.~~  
And Past You had been too enraged to fight well.

And now you're leading them to your only sanctuary. Aliens kill trolls. Trolls kill mutants, dissenters, and especially mutant dissenters.

So you're clearly insane.

You reach the midsized chamber you'd chosen to fortify in. You don't have much. A shallow hollow filled with some of the softer mosses for you to sleep in. A lichen garden (a terrible one, one you should be ashamed of if it hadn't kept you alive). Your second cavern map, better than the hideous first draft you found the aliens at. You turn around and wait, arms crossed, sickle (which they gave back?!?) in one hand, while they talk. Then Dhav grabs the bulky metal cylinder off his back and sets it down - hitting a few buttons or something. Then the damn thing starts floating, and sprouts an array of limbs, with drills, spikes, and claws. You have a moment's outraged fear before it inexplicably begins tunneling into the wall.

Jhon walks over towards you, finding an empty section of the cave (which is a little too big for you alone, given what you have), and sets down a hexagonal polyhedron (hemospectrumist assumptions about intelligence can suck your brilliant bone bulge). It unfolds, grows, unfolds again. You take a step back, but Jhon seems undeterred, giving you a close-lipped grin again (like he's scared to show his damn teeth!). "Oulun aurley, Korkot, inseba re."

Yeah, thanks, asshole, that definitely means something you can understand.

The dodecahedron has finished, grown to half the size of a starter hive, and Jhon pushes open a door on the side that's flat to the ground.

A pre-made hive? Okay, maybe their entire species doesn't have rotting think-sacs. Although you can't say a lot for the design. Geometric, really?

Dhav comes over and clicks his fingers together, making a snapping noise that gets your attention and doesn't make you flinch at all.

He crouches, and waves you both down. Jhon mimics his pose, and with some irritation (trolls aren't meant to bend this much), you do so as well.

He stabs his blade deep into the rock, then pushes his hand against it, drawing a thin line of blood he smears on the ground in a curving arc.

Jhon seems to follow, and bites the inside of his cheek, hard, reopening the wounds you made, then reaches into his mouth, and smears a following line.

You look down at the red two-thirds of a circle.

And you know what?

Fuck any misplaced loyalty you might still. have to the Alternian Empire.  
Fuck the impossibility of the three of you doing anything.  
Fuck the fact that you can't even understand them yet.  
You're tired of being alone.

Your claws dig into your arm, and you drip blood like some demented painter to complete the circle.

And despite the lack of words, their alien nature, your outcast habits, you think you get it.

This is a promise of war.


	6. Dave is not idle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time passes. And thoughts can't take the place of actions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added a couple relationship tags. Some of which are in the past, and some of which are in as-yet-undefined quadrants.

38 hours, 15 minutes since atmospheric entry.  
Day Two on Trollworld. (John disagrees with your renaming of Gliese 581 e, arguing that for starters this can hardly be the only planet, or even any important planet, for a spacefaring civilization like the aliens have to be. You tell him he can shut up, it's your log.)

John got about six hours of sleep. You popped a stimulant and slumped against the wall for six hours, watching Karkat calmly with a big blinky red AMPHETAMINE IN SYSTEM, FURTHER CONSUMPTION PROHIBITED FOR 8-7-6-5-4-3-2 HOURS in the corner of your visor overlay the entire time.

John's newfound alien "friend" doesn't seem to have any stims. He still manages to stay (mostly) awake, staring right back at you when he can lift his eyes.

Your multitool is a few centimeters from your right hand. His scything blade is a few centimeters from his.

You don't think you have any trust issues, no. It's Egbert that does, the way he assumes the alien that tried to rip his face off is just a nice guy with a temper.

Whatever. You pop another ration cube supplement - mostly proteins. You know you're gonna need them.

 

John finally wakes his ass up and eagerly starts harassing the alien verbally. The grey little guy gives John one of the two faces Egbert usually gets: blankfaced suspicion (as opposed to simple stupor). The boy's a champion rambler.

You go off towards the deeper parts of the cavern complex - which is to say, you go to the other side of your prefab cabin.

You start with calisthenics. Once your body has stopped whining about the lack of sleep and the amphetamines, you switch to heavy form repetition.

You realize you don't actually have any idea how effective your practice sword-fighting will be in a real fight. John's been in more legitimate fights than you have. He's dorky as hell but he sure isn't lacking in brass balls.

You take maybe an hour just for this - first moving your body alone, then popping your multitool and spinning it. Your style is a tangled mess of everything you've learned. Some Italian fencing, some kendo, some German dueling techniques.

You finish, sweat-free and a little smug at your obvious fitness, and turn around to find you have an audience. The alien is standing stiffly, more so when you meet his gaze. He spreads his lips and reveals those jagged teeth in a grimace.

You spin your multitool in one hand. He can test you if he likes.

He walks up to you. Head cranked back, and oh you can tell the height difference is pissing him off. In that raspy growl of a voice that seems louder than it is, he says, "Dave to move."

"Verbs and subjects in an hour? Even without conjugation... damn, Egbert. Quit showing me up. 'course you probably just got lucky on the phrasing, huh, Karkles?"

He sure as hell catches the tone you're using, if not the words, and clearly enunciates his response. "Fuck. Ass."

Well shit, you can't be disrespecting a mind that demands to know the profanity as part of his first English lesson. You step aside.

The alien walks into the same place you were, more or less, and starts doing push-ups, unhindered by his ratty brown robe. Your smile widens a little when he grunts after the first couple dozen. Little out of shape, Karkat?  
He scowls at you when he gets up, and pulls his sword. Little under half a meter, long handle with no crossgrip, and a concave blade. Kind of like a khopesh. You figure it's got to be a titanium alloy with how light it is. And monomolecular - which is fuckin' mean, yeah, but it takes a crazy amount of maintenance, which you can't see your short angry Obi-Wan here being able to pull off in his cave. But he managed to cut into your suit, so he must not have been using it at all.

Nothing you have to worry about killing, then. That's... irritating.

You watch for a couple minutes while Karkat practices his own techniques. You think his joints must work a little differently, but his style is suited for it. It looks like mostly close-in cuts and backslashes, with an emphasis on parrying and deflecting to handle reach.

You idly start devising counters to it, interrupted by a sudden transmission.

The repair bot has reached the half-life of its main and secondary drills, and collected everything that radar pinged as different from the surrounding rock within that area.

Chemical analysis gives you a couple kilos of iron and aluminium, and a few grams of titanium, beryllium, platinum, and a dozen other not-entirely-rare earths. This you can work with.

You scramble to set up a metallurgy lab from necessity. Not from any need to urgently keep from thinking.

 

It takes you three days. John teaches Karkat basic English grammar (more or less), and starts exchanging vocabulary. Karkat learns a prodigious number of English insults and rapidly develops his own methods of combining them. All of which he saves for John.

You? You get surly glares, wary nods, and he always happens to be practicing his swordfighting in the same place you use, right before or right after you.

You think the little fucker respects you or something. It's unnerving.

The forge takes up most of your time. Tools. Structures. Heat. You replace the drill bits on the repair bot and send it out again and again, always hunting for more material. You're not going to half-ass this in the slightest.

"Dave! Um, what are you doing?"

"Building a machine shop, Egbert, what's it look like?"

"Huh! Awesome!"

You wait an entire twelve seconds.

"Why?"

"Because one troll put a two centimeter cut into my exosuit, John. The next troll I run into isn't going to have it that easy. I'm making armor."

You can see him out of the corner of your eye. He puts one hand over his chest, feeling his own exosuit.

"Dave..."

"John. You can talk to Vantas all you want, but remember our real first contact was with those missiles up-"

"Dave!" He grabs your shoulder, and you feel your suit go rigid under his vice-like grip. "Have you even listened to what Karkat's been telling me? The Alternian _Empire_." John takes a deep breath, still locking you in place. Jesus, if you were unsuited you'd have a broken collarbone by now. "This is a war. Whether we like it or not. And this front is you, me, and a guy who I'm not even sure if I explained the words "defect", "traitor", or "amnesty" to the right way. Against, if I understand Karkat right, like thirty trolls who are all bigger and stronger than him, you, and probably me."

You tilt your head a little. _Get on with it, John, you're being confusing as hell. And that's my department._

"Make it really strong. I think we just got promoted to soldiers. And we're gonna be the kind that makes it home, no matter how much we talk about our sweethearts back home and how we're two weeks short."

Those deep blue eyes shouldn't be that hard. That cheery dorkass overbite shouldn't be gritted. Those giant, gentle hands shouldn't be in tight fists. A part of you that you had really really hoped you'd smothered to death after your sophomore year fling and breakup clutches at your heart and chokes your circulation. John shouldn't look like this.

And just like that, he doesn't. His face dissolves into a grin, dopey as ever. He relaxes his hands and spreads them out - and his multitool snaps out from his waist, flies to the magnetic pad on his glove, shifts its morphic structure to a hammerhead. "We're going to be live heroes. Whatever it takes."


	7. The Windy Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave knows his way around fire and metal. John prefers other elements. Karkat just boils inside.

**[Suit-to-Suit Transmission Log, 4378:46-4379:08, Genesis Tracker Mission Hours]**  
John Egbert: okay, but how did you know it would work??  
Dave Strider: jesus john do i have to go over my status as supreme badass rebel again  
DS: and the mystical powers of outside the rulebook genius  
JE: hey, i coulda thought up a blood oath too! i want to know how you figured out karkat would fight his own people.  
JE: and how you managed to communicate that to him!!  
DS: his color wasn't on the hull  
JE: what?  
DS: of the ship stupid  
DS: the one that shot us down  
DS: bringing up any memories  
JE: oh! i get you. but we didn't even know anything about their whole blood color thing, how did you figure it wasn't just a "this is the blood of our enemies" and they were all red-blooded?  
DS: hindsight makes the genius, egbert  
JE: ... so you didn't know. why did you do it then???  
DS: because it looked badass  
JE: ... can't argue with that.  
DS: okay speaking of questions  
DS: what the fuck is up with your mad translating skills  
DS: i know it's not karkat dude has the surliest of apathy  
DS: two weeks and you got him understanding and arguing about abstract philosophical concepts  
DS: justice and humanism and shit  
DS: keep expecting to hear him talking to you about the shadows on the cave wall  
DS: plus you picked up all these ideas about trolls like this quadrants thing and the lususes and their weirdass compound titles for everything  
DS: and you dont even speak spanish  
JE: uh, no, dave, but i do speak hindi, arabic, german, mandarin, cantonese, and bantu!  
DS: what  
JE: what did you think I was doing with the international trainees after-hours at ISS training for 14 months?  
DS: getting more or less constantly laid in a vain attempt to get over me  
JE: aw don't worry, you take a lot of getting over dave strider. i just did it by getting fluent in six languages and beating the shit out of people at judo tournaments.  
JE: oh! and learning carpentry.  
DS: carpentry  
JE: dad really likes well-made giant furniture and i wanted to surprise him for my 25th birthday.  
JE: i didn't disappear during senior year because i hated you after we broke up or anything.  
JE: i vanished cuz all my spare time was going to making dad an armoire.  
DS: im going to sleep  
DS: cant take any more egbert

You've known Karkat Vantas for 187 hours and you don't think he actually gets any happier than this.  
"No, fuckass. If I try to claim you as prisoners to earn my way back in, they'll just shoot you, then me. You don't get anything about the hemospectrum."

The way he explained that, it's a blood color caste system, but it seems to be one of those concepts that's bigger than just a couple words can describe.

"Okay, what if we lured some of them outside to hunt you, then held them as hostages?"

"What the fuck is a hostage?"

"Um. Someone you can't kill because they're valuable?"

"Ha. Ha. Ha. Unless you can miraculously get the Projexecutioner himself out after me, he'll just have them shoot your "hostage", then us."

"Can we-?"

"John. Dude. Movie plans aren't going to work."

"Dave, it is three of us with minimal resources against a base of forty-eight Alternians. It has to be a movie plan because nothing else is crazy enough to work!"

Dave lets out a long, slow sigh. "Alright. I was trying to be the arbitrator of sanity between you and The Frothing Rage Revolution over here-" A description that has Karkat growling and flexing his claws, but it is a useless attack against Dave's impenetrable walls of Don't Give A Shit. "But you're right. Clearly sanity is not what we need here."

"Exactly! Dave, we need chaos! We need a crazy ass plan that will have repercussions even we don't anticipate, because the three of us will react to it a lot better than a bunch of guys constrained by their chain of command and 'hemospectrum'."

You suddenly grin madly - not the "John is fucking STOKED" grin that makes your friends roll their eyes in preparation of a verbal thesis defending whatever ancient vid you've dug up and fallen in love with this week. No. You have a prankster's grin.  
"Dave. What's the difference between a flare gun that shoots a suborbital-burst EM-bubbled plasma burst and a rocket launcher?"

"What?"

"Virtually nothing."

"No, hold up, what? Our flare guns shoot what?"

"Didn't you read any of the documentation?"

"Did I-. John. Dude."

"Kidding!"

"Better have been. Seriously I read that they have a 1 km minimum range and a 10,000 km maximum, what the fuck else did I need to know. It's a flare gun. It makes light." He lowers his visor just a hair, the barest glint of red iris showing over it. "That's what I thought, anyway. Are you telling me that on every EVA I've been carrying a fucking... I dunno, plasma cannon?"

"It makes a lot more than light, Dave! It's for emergency rescue operations in deep space. Between the plasma and the burst emitter nodes on the EM cage it sprays pretty much the entire spectrum with "I am here, please help me." Which means visible light, IR, UV, microwave, x-ray, gamma ray..."

"... so no, you're telling me that on every EVA I've been carrying a fucking... DOOM CANNON."

"Pretty much!"

"Why the fuck did nobody tell me this." Dave's voice gets as high volume as it ever does. Which is to say, maybe a 2 decibel increase.

"The ISS didn't really think intelligent spacefaring aliens existed, Dave, let alone hostile ones! The minimum range is hardwired in, and your suit or the ship hull will protect you from everything the flare emits at that range."

"You still haven't told me what any of your technical terms mean, bulgelicker, but from The Dave Human's reaction I take it these 'flare' guns are dangerous?"

You know Karkat's fake-alien dialog is intended solely to grab Dave's attention back from sputtering shock, so you just smirk when Dave tugs down his shades to glare at Karkat. His "behold my freaky blood-red stare" gambit doesn't work very well against the guy whose species always shows its blood color in its eyes, though.

"Yup! Basically we could blow a gigantic gaping hole in one side of the complex, then sneak around to the other side to get in! Oh. Um. Except for the safety mechanics that won't let it fire at significant sources of EM radiation. Which are also hardwired."

Dave slowly and dramatically facepalms. Then he grabs his multitool from his belt and stands up, walking over towards the equipment locker in your premade-habitat, where the flare guns and bots are resting. "Hard-wired just means it hasn't met Dave Strider yet."

 

"You're both grubwaste insane."

"Sure, Karkat, but who isn't? Even taking cross-species differences into account, I can't imagine you guys are any more uniform than us. Different think-pans for everyone." You give him a big cheerful grin.

He glowers. "No, I'm fucking rational, it's your entire species and my entire species that are gibbering sopor pie-eaters."

You don't quite get that one, but you don't get a lot of Karkat's angry cultural references (not surprisingly, considering there's an entire culture's worth of them to learn!), and you just respond to them with a grin.  
"It'll work."

"Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Your crazy plan that isn't even a real plan beyond "shoot our way in then fight while outnumbered ten to one" will definitely work, we'll steal a ship, and then you can just take me back to your world to be the only troll there, so I get to answer all the questions your interrogougers have about our all-devouring empire that shot your ship down."

"If they want to put the pokers to anyone, they'll have to go through me to get to you, Karkat."

He looks up from the floor and stares at you across the heating cube, mouth slightly agape.

"I'm not joking," you say in The Serious Tone, the one that's so blunt (not comedic, not dramatic, that ugly little space in between) it practically hurts to use it. "I'll take any fallout from my own people, and I'll fight them before I give you up to torture. Not that we torture!"

"... I guess. Maybe. You're not insane, John."

You turn to Karkat, who is staring at you with a very quiet, calm intensity - really, all the more disturbing, coming from him. You nod, just once, slowly, and turn back to your display, a projected floor plan of the alterforming facility you've hashed out over several days from Karkat's memories.

"Slimebrained and cull-seeking, maybe. Just not insane."

You can't help breaking out in laughter. You can't stop it either, even when Karkat kicks you in the leg, then the chest.

 

By day ten, Dave has the materials and tools he needs to do the specialty work. By day thirteen his exosuit has another layer, titanium-alloy welded to the plates, turning high-tech vacuum-suit into something that looks more like medieval armor. By day sixteen, the flare guns' circuitry have had their safeties disabled (although they're still untested. Duh, one-shots).

You go outside every day. Dave and Karkat are agoraphobic tunnel rats, the troll practicing his swordfighting as much as Dave does, and more - he either exercises, runs through stances, or meditates (which, for Karkat, involves a lot of grumbling and shifting positions before usually giving up. When he actually manages to focus (or de-focus), he settles into a peaceable low growl which you are definitely not going to call a purr because he will claw you) whenever Dave is forging.

It seemed silly at first. Swordfighting? In the year 2413? But after your initial chuckle at the idea, you gave it a look: probably a lot of corridor fighting against some really strong people who have a cultural affinity for using melee weapons, and your entire armory consists of modular tools that can pretty easily become cutting and smashing implements but can't make projectile launchers very well, two one-shots that are more of bombs than guns, and reaction pistols that shoot compressed gas with a maximum force of about a sneeze.

So, maybe not so crazy. You don't practice hitting things with a hammer nearly as much as Dave and Karkat work with their blades (hitting rocks with a hammer is _really fucking fun_ , though, especially when you give it your full strength with the biggest, heaviest-headed maul you can custom-configure your multitool's dynamic structure to. You aren't entirely sure about hitting _people_ that hard, though. You know you have to be a soldier now, but you still don't _want_ to kill anyone.).  
You practice your judo a little more, and manage to get Karkat to try it (best learning is through teaching), mostly by reminding him it's designed to be good against larger, stronger opponents. Practice encourages you a bit - Karkat learns fast, but even with the odd gravity and his sheer density (30 cm shorter and only 2 kg lighter than you) you can slam him into the ground pretty hard - and discourages you almost as much - slamming him into the cave floor as hard as you can, head-first, just stuns him for a few dozen seconds, not so much as a cracked bone or concussion (not that you want to concuss Karkat or break his bones, just - well, if you can't take the self described rage-filled runt out with your unarmed skills, how are you going to handle the giant-ass highbloods he's described?).

Karkat and Dave practice swords in the now-fiery caves where Forgemaster Strider girds you for war. And you go up to the surface to weather the storms, lock yourself to the ground and think about tacics, crazy heroic movie attacks, and what exactly you're going to do when you start this whole thing.

 

So naturally, you're the one that notices things changing.  
It starts when the magnetic field fluctuates for a moment - and the cyclical windstorm takes that moment to hurl you into the air. You flare your boots - and the maglock gloves, which you've tweaked to synch with the boots, using the same control program you've written (much sloppier and slower than the one Dave would have made, but he's been busy and you know better than to interrupt a Strider masterpiece in the making, be it song or steel).  
The planetary magnetic field is going haywire - flipping polarity, shifting poles, everything else following the chaotic pattern. Even with a magnetometer overlay showing you the local field, it seems like it's going to be pretty impossible to avoid a touching 300 km/h reunion with the ground.  
You do it anyway. It's like swimming in the heaviest seas you can imagine, like trying to mountain-climb during an earthquake with the fault directly under you, like - oh, who are you kidding, it's like _flying_ and you are like fucking Iron Man here, twisting, spinning, kicking, and pulling off sweet-ass aerial maneuvers that would have Dave needing a fresh pair of pants if you pulled them on the dance floor.  
You goddamn fly right through this little windy thing and slam to the ground exactly as hard as you want to when it ends, landing on one knee with an outstretched hand hitting the ground to stabilize you (and your mind gibbering in squealing fanboyish delight because you are doing the fucking Terminator time-travel pose and you _rock_ ).  
You wait outside for another hour, but the magnetic field has stabilized after that first frenzy. That doesn't keep you from flying through every single windblast in that hour (about a hundred and twenty of them), even if your flight has gone from a certain-death once in a lifetime impossibility to a mere death-defying stunt that nobody without a suicide craving or an adrenaline addiction worse than the strongest methamphetamine cocktail would ever elicit.  
You're still goddamn _flying_.

That's on Local Day 13 (Rotational speed indications from orbit gave Gliese 581 e a 30-hour day, so that's T+413 hours since landing). By Hour 448, the winds are down to six second bursts every fifty-five seconds (averaged). By Hour 498, the ground-level winds are down to 35 km/h at their strongest, although there's an exponential velocity:altitude relationship, with the constant blizzard/world-tornado still streaking by a hundred meters overhead. The magnetic fields in your suit still let you fly at that altitude, but the EM generators start guzzling massive amounts to overcome the inverse-square law, so you cut your windstorm-fighting out entirely.  
Oh well, you still have the footage to watch and remember.

 

Karkat isn't at all surprised when you tell him about the massive atmospheric changes.  
"What the hell did you think the alterforming facility was there for? The _core-eater_ is settled in, so they're making the surface enough of a non-shithole to walk around in. Gotta keep the cloud layer to eat the _flesh-burning_ , though, so they only fixed the _iron grip_ to be stable on the ground."  
Without trying to give him an introductory course in science from a human perspective, then introduce every single technical term you can remember, you and Karkat tend to fall back on compound, almost poetic descriptors of technical details. It reminds you of learning German, actually. _röntgenuntersuchung Verantwortungsbereich_. Heh.

Okay, so the trolls put an artificial core into Gliese 581 e, which proceeded to remove most of the high-mass core and replace it with, uh, itself, you think. And this core is a gigantic, fuckin' titan-sized EM field generator (possibly mimicking a liquid core? Metaphorical descriptors are lovely and simple and all, but they don't make technical details that easy to grasp), which can actually segment the biosphere with the field it's generating.

You manage to keep from going stark raving mad at the immense amount of power and engineering required for this, let alone the fact that you're going to war with the civilization that created it, but it's only by retreating a little bit into a pulp sci-fi viewpoint. It's cool, they probably have a Death Star too, parked next to the Dyson Sphere.

By Hour 551, Dave's exosuit is armored. Your exosuit is armored. The hazardous environment bot is disassembled, its plating reforged into a breastplate and bracers for Karkat. You have your breacher bombs (aka flare guns). And the surface is clear enough that any localized radar on the alterscaping facility will pick you up from dozens of kilometers away.

Crap.

By Hour 556 you've modified your gear for Plan B-3(e).

You've also fucked Dave.

Badass rebels don't worry about dying. They do make their inevitable sexual conquest right before the final battle, though, to reinforce their badassness and provide extra pathos if they bite it.

(You don't mind playing into Dave's narrative, even if you long ago lost any romantic feelings for him, and vice-versa. It comforts you too.)

That does push implementing Plan B-3(e) back to Hour 557 so you can explain the human concept of casual sex (and enough of the methods to make him shut up about buckets) to Karkat. Fortunately you don't have to explain anything about the Kinsey Scale, the 2330s, and the Rejection of Binary Sexuality, because he just takes it as a given that a dude can fuck another dude. He just thinks it's weird and alien and gross that you're doing it as moirails (which you think is totally the wrong idea. Best friends? Definitely. Best friends who restrain each other from doing stupid shit? Hell no, you're best friends who egg each other on, make insane drunken dares, and peer pressure each other to drink, eat, climb, harass, and run like hell from things you shouldn't - and help each other out when you trip, sure, but you're not sure it counts if Dave tripped you to begin with. Even if he did come back before the tiger got to you. Trolls don't have a quadrant for you two, from what Karkat says. You think they already have enough sources of self-destructive behavior).

 

T+557 Hours.  
The three of you stand fully exposed on the surface for the first time in weeks, even by Gliese 581 e-days. The hab is still below, but you've rigged the power systems to slag the entire thing if you don't stop it within 48 hours. Almost nothing else remains. Dave's machine shop has been cannibalized bit by bit, each tool being made into a spare weapon or utility item until whatever's left functional isn't sophisticated enough to make anything useful. The repair assist bot is strapped to Dave's back again, after grinding the cave walls clean of everything Karkat carved into them.  
Said temporary cavern dweller is grinding his teeth again. You made the harness as simple and dignified as you could. It's not like either of you chose to be the sizes you are relative to each other. And you are 100% certain he doesn't even get the context of Dave saying you look like an Oil Era soccer mom with a gigantism-striken monster baby carrier.  
He doesn't have a helmet - the polymer your exosuit faceplates are made of is something Dave had no chance in hell of replicating - but you have given Karkat a spare visor and a microvocalizing/eardrum comm unit. Both of which he is now furiously employing. And he's actually microvocalizing, not just yelling into the pickup. Even if he is sorta whispering, which basically translates to yelling on the commnet. Still, Dave owes you thirty credits.

**[Commnet: Impossible Odds. Users: John Egbert, Dave Strider, Karkat Vantas]**  
Karkat Vantas: LET'S JUST FUCKING DO THIS ALREADY.  
KV: I ALWAYS WANTED TO DIE STRAPPED TO A SUICIDAL ALIEN.  
John Egbert: relax, karkat! this is gonna work perfectly, it's just going to get a bit windy.

That's when you crank your EM fields to complete overdrive, and leave the ground behind.  
You take the screaming and not-quite-flailing troll with you. After all, he's strapped to your chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> röntgenuntersuchung Verantwortungsbereich : radiographic examination responsibilities, or more literally "x-ray-under-study responsible-responsibility-area"  
> (Assuming my google-fu is not rusty.)


	8. John's Best Laid Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Culture clash often results in violence. Sometimes it results in radioactive violence.

You announce yourself with fire from the heavens.  
You descend on wings of plasma and armored in the metals descended from steel.  
You deliver your celestial message at the edge of a sword.

And goddamn you, John was right. This is fucking working. At least a half-dozen trolls down in the rubble from your "flare" gun. Some of them are shifting the giant slabs of super-cement (fine, engineered cementitious composite, shut up brain Jade), but you hit these poor bastards with everything from microwaves to gamma rays, and you don't think these ~~5~~ 7 trolls will be able to do much besides vomit if they can even get out.

That leaves the eight now stampeding down the exposed corridors, three from the left and five from the right - two of whom are the highblood Securitectors Karkat told you about and _holy fuck are those assholes huge_. The fucking Vredefort asteroid to John's Chicxulub (thanks again, mental Jade, you don't really need to remember these little science details in the middle of fighting for your life).

You charge them.

Like there was any fucking way you were going to do anything else.

Maybe John's onto something here, because the magnetic field that kicks your leap up an extra half-meter lets you slide your blade quietly into an eye socket, sending the cerulean-blooded giant to the ground. Luckily the low grav and your absurd amount of illicit drugs runnin through your bloodstream help you react in time, and you kick off the body's weapon, doing an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle of her ridiculously giant axe.

Of course, that still leaves the blueblooded one. And the other three trolls in this corridor, who despite being technicians of some kind, are pretty much just as fuckin' berserker rage as the surviving Securitector.

It's all good. You're the angel of death and you've got a goddamn flaming sword for them.

Well. Flame and sword. Close enough. One hand brings your tool around, sliding the blade out until the reach:tensile strength hits just the right ratio to almost be an oversized katana, and the other taps a new, ad hoc control on your gauntlet.

You're real sorry you had to chop up your repair bot, stuff in all the extra power packs to overdrive its engines. But the acetylene cutting torch welded to your left gauntlet makes a nice memento.

The overprimed flame jumps out like a lance, and you swing it in an arc while your sword blocks a bone-rattling swing of a giant spiked mace, snaps the enemy weapon at the hilt, and rips through to the arm.

You have reinforced armor over a titainium-alloy exosuit, and he has a light uniform that looks like polyester.

Fuck him, this troll asshole shoulda gone to John if he wanted a fair fight. You finish him.

Two of the technicians are on the ground, one of them still screaming as he clutches at the blackened remains of his face. The last is running for it as fast as he can.

You've already stretched one leg out in anticipation of a sprint when a grey hand grabs you and you spin around, sword flashing.

It gets slapped down with a squealing, sparking arc along the curve of Karkat's blade.  
"Dude. Fucking no."

You blink at him for a moment. A livid streak of yellow is painted across his left bracer, and there are splattered dots of brown on his breastplate.  
You wonder what kind of multicolor mess you look like, and that's enough. You nod slowly. "Yeah. Okay."

John practically bounces over to you two. He's irritatingly free of bloodstains, although the giant honking hammer he's packing has some kind of rapidly drying stain on it.

"Alright! Where do we go from here?"

If you and Karkat are giving identical stares of shock, rage, and horror at the Sheer Fucking Egbert levels going on, it's not from any similarity between the two of you. It's just the goddamn Universal Constant of John.

"This is your plan, did your goddamned think pan overheat?!"

John cranes his head down a bit. It still irks you that he has the couple of cm on you to do that. His grin is just fucking nuts, though, forcing you to abandon annoyance for ~~mild terror~~ more annoyance. "The plan is chaos, Karkat. The plan is madness, and insanity, and sound and fury, signifying nothing. We're here to give you blood, and you got it. That was the plan."

John abruptly closes his mouth, hiding the snarl of a grin that was making Vantas'd dentistry look like it belonged on a goddamn herbivore. "Anyway, I think phase one worked out pretty damn well! Let's head for the boss office while they're still trying to figure out what's going on." He casually tilts his maul at the left corridor. "The entrances to the maintenance tunnels are hidden but marked, right?" (You know John can't have forgotten that already. He's gotta be... oh, he's distracting Karkat from the whole murder deal.)

_Stop being deep, Egbert, it ruins your whole dork vibe._

"Right. They aren't built for bluebloods and overgrown freak aliens in giant armor suits, though. I did fucking point that out, even if past me had his head too far up his waste excretion chute to hammer that into your think pan."

"Oh, we'll find a way."  
You also both fucking hate it when he's this cheery. Again, this doesn't mean you have anything in common. It's just... John.

 

You knew this was going to work. Draw attention up top, sneak through the underground, it's like dealing with an ant hive.

You do have to duck to make it through the maintenance tunnels, but you've been in tight spaces before! Honestly, does Karkat think they just threw you guys into space without training? You crouch and sidestep through the short, narrow passages behind Karkat.

**[Commnet: Impossible Odds]**  
JE: no offense karkat but this place is kind of a pit!  
KV: NO SHIT MORON. IT'S LIKE ANYONE WHO REFUSES TO BUY INTO THEIR HEMOSPECTRUM AND GO AROUND FLASHING THEIR BLOOD COLOR GETS BENT OVER THE KISMESISTIC BUCKET BY EVERYBODY OVER THEM.  
DS: welcome to the world lil buddy everybody weird gets to deal with this shit  
KV: YOU HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT I'VE BEEN THROUGH, STRIDER  
DS: well shucks naw pally  
DS: might have something to do with me being from a sane civilization  
JE: dave, don't be ridiculous.  
JE: you're from texas, let's not pretend it's sane.  
DS: oh fuck off washigton  
DS: excuse me yes id like a state with two things and two things only  
DS: rain and earthquakes  
DS: why then sir you will want to expend all your pretentiousness buying an express ticket to washington  
JE: heh heh. (pretentiousness is a downside for you, dave? really?)  
KV: DO YOU TWO EVER STOP SHOUTBOX FIGHTING? LITERALLY IN HOSTILE TERRITORY HERE AND YOU'RE NOT EVEN PAYING ATTEN-

The searchlight must blind Karkat, based on his sudden screech of pain, but your visor (and presumably Dave's) filter it near-instantaneously, so it's just about as bad as a neo-classical camera flash. Then your vision clicks over into infrared, where the output is noticeably lower.

Oh ~~bugger~~ ~~shit~~ ~~fuck~~ FUCK.

There are about twenty trolls set up in a basically Napoleonic formation behind that light. First rank on one knee, raised polearms and stabbing weapons. Second rank behind them with raised pistols and longarms - one of whom, looks cerulean, is packing some kind of monster gun, the kind that has feed tubes from a backpack he's wearing.

"Did you imagine our think pans had completely rotted, mutant? As soon as we saw you we could guess you'd scurry down here like the sewagebeast you are. You even brought the aliens the Highblood ship failed to down. We'll have to posthumously honor you, by not voiding our liquid waste organs on your body."  
Wow. This guy has a really annoyingly scratchy voice. His Alternian sounds about the same as Karkat's, though, nowhere near the dialect difference you and Dave have in English.

DS: plan time, wunderkind?  
JE: dave, hold their attention. karkat, flank right, i'll go left. rush in when they're distracted, strider.

You take off at a sprint, streaking off while Karkat becomes a blur in the other direction. You hear fire - ballistic and heavier - following you, but it doesn't catch up before you make it to a side tunnel.

A high-pitched whine reaches further up the wavelengths until it's inaudible, then - a blinding light seeps into the side tunnels from the main passage. And Dave's suit vitals go blank.

Your legs fall out from under you. You respond by slamming on your magnetic thrusters, sending yourself screaming down the corridor even faster, cannonballing off the wall, snapping back into the main chamber.  
Only two thoughts can get into your mind right now.  
 _YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP._  
 _DAVE._

You hit the troll formation with all the force you can accumulate, hammer arcing to throw an entire section of trolls aside, mashing more than a few bones.

You kick back and stabilize for your next swing right next to the cerulean leader, whose overcharged gun is still glowing from shooting-

You smash into him, barreling him to the ground while he swings his gun muzzle into your shoulder.

You bring your hammer down into his chest, feeling the solid organ-pulping blow just as his finger jerks back on the trigger.  
You roll back  
and  
into  
darkness.


	9. Ending via expansion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conclusion of sorts to this story, and hints at the ones to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello ~~Dante~~ Erik.

There's nothing like seeing all your dreams go up in ash.

Dave lies staggered at the entrance, and you couldn't make it five paces before you had to duck back and use him for cover. John, flung back from the blast, slides across the tunnel floor. His arm is gone, half his helmet with it.

They're dead. They're both dead. You ran off into the fucking ice waste hell planet so you wouldn't get your friends killed with you. Then these _asshole_ aliens came along. Shared with you. Bled with you. Swore with you.

Fuck the Alternian Empire.  
Fuck your idiot human "friends" for doing this.  
Fuck you for failing them.

You spin your sickle over the two (fucking two!) trolls you've killed so far. "Come on if you think you're hard enough!"

There's more than enough of them, more than strong enough to drag you down. You don't fucking care.

A hand grabs your leg, you spin to finish one you thought was down - your sickle rattles off Dave's gauntlets.

**[Commnet: Impossible Odds]**  
DS: chekovs gun  
KV: WHAT

He holds up the collapsible tube. This will kill him. You. John ( ~~John's dead, give up~~ ). And every single one of them.

You practically rip it out of his arms, spin around to face your charging kinsfolk, shove the thing to your shoulder, and thank Dave for giving you a good death.

KV: AUTHORIZATION: HARPER'S FERRY. FIRE.

You say the magic words and fire off your ugly little miracle.

 

You're alive. For how long, you don't know. But you were behind Dave, and his suit (intact aside from the sharp armor-piercing gut wound). You feel like you can walk and fight, not like you have to vomit everything you've ever eaten and die, so you didn't catch too much radiation...  
You look up. The EM field and its plasma contents ripped their way through the remaining formation, leaving severe burns on the trolls who weren't just blown apart - then it punched through the inner walls, hit the cavern complex the station was built over, and exploded somewhere down there.

You're alive.

Just you.

DS: go check on john.  
Gaping, you spin around. You were fucking sure those were last words - but Strider has pulled himself to a half-upright position, and is stuffing a grey putty into his wound with what has to be fucking impossible pain tolerance.

KV: JOHN... HE'S... THERE'S NO WAY HE COULD HAVE.  
DS: suit vitals are weak but existent  
DS: go check

You run. Every mote of energy you've got, you hurl into your sprint, stopping only to kick a terminally injured tealblood trying to remove your ankles with a knife. You think you cracked her skull, but you don't have time to fucking care.

John is charred. His shoulder, the flesh exposed by the broken suit all along his left side, his _face_...

KV: THE PLASMA STOPPED THE BLEEDING BUT THESE BURNS ARE TOO MUCH.  
DS: theres a pouch on the back of the suit above the waist  
DS: giant patch of goey fabric in there  
DS: rip it into enough pieces and slap it on the burns

You do that as fast as your fumbling hands can. There's a little hiss as you apply each patch and see it expand, then contract onto John's skin. When you're down to the last few fingers of wound at the side of his chest, he moves.

JE: fnergerrt.  
JE: guh.  
JE: ow.  
KV: WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED HERE. DO I HAVE TO START BELIEVING IN GAMZEE'S RETARD RELIGION FOR MORONS BECAUSE THAT WAS A FUCKING MIRACLE.

An armored hand thumps your shoulder. Dave is walking steadily, a thick armored patch attached over his damaged suit. "That's the not-at-all-miraculous product of medical technology in a society that hasn't used the word "cull" in about six hundred years."

Okay. You can deal with this.

JE: i fucked up.

You can't deal with this.

KV: WHAT.  
KV: NO YOU STUPID WASTE EXCRETION HOLE YOU JUST SAVED OUR FUCKING LIVES.  
KV: ASSUMING YOU'RE GOING TO LIVE THAT IS.  
JE: my plan was bad and my improv plan was worse.  
JE: and i almost killed you both.  
DS: yeah well  
DS: almost

Dave leans down and grabs John's remaining arm, then yanks him to his feet. He pops his gauntlet, slathers his glove in something from the box on his chest, then rubs it into the patched wound on John's side.

JE: dave, was i shot in the brain?  
DS: nope  
JE: dave did you just shoot me in the brain?  
DS: nope  
DS: that's the mild counteractive for the massive painkillers youre on  
DS: to make you actually capable of thought  
JE: oh  
JE: dave if i was capable of hating you i would hate you right now  
DS: gotta use that thinkpan for now buddy  
DS: tranq you again when were on the ship home  
JE: urk.  
JE: fine. let's go find the projecexecutioner.  
JE: and kick his teeth in.

You can't disagree. Jegus, you feel like you could take on the Condesce right now.

That feeling lasts all of three minutes, the time it takes you to get out of the maintenance tunnels and walk (or stagger) through empty corridors. You're still too bloodrushed from killing their normal inhabitants to feel like these halls are haunted yet.

You reach the rotunda in front of the Projexecutioner's office.

And his door explodes outward.

The indigo is a good head and a half taller than Dave, and almost an arm's length wider than John. He's made of living power crammed into a trollish frame and holy fuck is he terrifying. A black cloud seeps out from him, coating everything in darkness… darkness that hides shapes you don't want to see. Your breaths are shallow, sharp.

Highblood psychics are rare, but they completely dominate lowblood minds. You know this as rote, as bluntly true as the hemospectrum.

You look over at the two aliens. Two aliens with bright-red mutant blood. John is wavering back and forth, a little unsteady, but the fact alone that he has a grip on that giant hammer is a freakish act of strength. Dave has a narrow expression behind his faceplate, around his visor.

DS: this is the nightmare terror guy?  
DS: fuck him

It's not a fucking miracle. It's just… remembering something you always knew in your blood.  
You're not on the hemospectrum.  
It's still there, his power. His terrifying power. But it doesn't own you.  
Nobody.  
Owns.  
You.

"Go. I'll hold him off." You wonder who's babbling suicidal ideas in english until you realize it's you.

"Nah. We got this. Hold his attention." Dave smirks. Human irony sure is confusing.

Fuck it. You can probably do this. Sickle out, raised, pointed right at his giant face full of those massive fangs ~~that do not make you feel like less of a troll at all~~.

He roars and lunges.

It is NOT fucking fair that anyone that size can be this _impossibly_ fast!  
You deflect one massive club swing (barely scoring its dense-as-hell material), barely duck another. You can't keep this up. His eyes are fucking boring into you, and maybe you can fight the fear but he can goddamn see your thoughts - no, that's the fear again. You _can't_ fight him with mind and body at the same time!

He connects. You feel a massive spike of pain in your right arm, and it goes limp. You switch to a one-handed sickle grip, but you're having trouble breathing for some stupid reason. You can barely keep your eyes open to see a long, hard horizontal swing burning towards you at head height.

But you snap both eyes open when there's a resounding clang.

John holds his hammer in his one arm, head impacted dead even with the club, and his stance is so tense, you think you could see every single muscle in it knotted with power.  
"Back. Off." His sepulchral tone makes his Alternian better, actually.  
The Projexecutioner laughs, and swings again - John can barely get the hammer's hilt in the way, and without a two-handed grip, it's ripped from his grasp, and he's knocked off his feet.

Dave flickers in, sword bouncing off every attack against John, but you can see he's tiring. Just one needs to get through - and it does, flipping him backward in what would almost be acrobatic if Dave didn't hit the wall head-first and plummet.

"Mutants. FREAKS. Rebels. BLASPHEMERS. You're gonna DIE. And it AIN'T gonna be QUICK."  
The massive indigo hefts his club, and gogdammit, you think he probably can take all three of you with one swing at this point. He's just too fucking strong.

His club stops. Its entire swing is halted, kinetic energy cut. A large grey hand is gripping it just above the Projexecutioner's fists.

"I must object, highblood."  
Of all the fucking people who could possibly fucking save your miserable life from a goddamned indigo culling, the absolute last one (okay second to last after Eridan "the forever alone douchebag" Ampora) is Equius Zahhak.  
"MotherFUCKER WHAT do you THINK you are DOING?"  
"Attempting to respect the hemospectrum." He reaches up with his other hand to adjust his eternally-cracked lenses. "But that token effort was all I am currently willing to offer." His free hand snakes out, latches around the Projexecutioner's neck and _twists_.

The indigo becomes dead weight, that Zahhak drops immediately.

"Vantas. Are you injured?"

"Well yeah, but - that can fucking wait! What are _you_ doing?"

Equius slowly removes each lens and wipes it on his sleeve - the uniform of a Maintechnician Commander. "I am hoping to put my own futile effort in to correct the gross injustice of our people."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"No. I will not value the hemospectrum any further. There is no honor to the system that has destroyed everyone that mattered to me."

"Destroyed?" You know you're gaping like a stuck fish. but this is _Equius Zahhak_ rebelling against the caste system.

"Ms. Megido is dying. Even before her blood would have aged her, she has been forced to use her powers so much they are killing her."

You knew this. Something like it. You didn't want to focus on the details because then you'd start thinking about Sollux and FUCK.

"Nepeta… is under threat of culling."

You can't respond. You - what the hell could _she_ have done?

"She killed her commander in the Skirmislayers. And stole a ship. She did this upon hearing of your outing and exile. I believe she is looking for you."

"Equius, I'm sorry-"

"It is not your fault, Vantas. It is the hemospectrum." God, you can hear his muscles flexing as he makes a fist. "I gave everything to following it, and it gave me nothing but pain in return. Go. I will not stop you."

"Are you going to stay here?" You both turn, staring at the one-armed man dragging his hammer across the floor, sending up little sparks. Damn, when did John's Alternian get so fluent? You've mostly been trying to learn from him, not schoolfeed him.

"I-" Equius hesitates, startled and confused by the changing circumstances. At least some parts of his personality are the same.

John pops his faceplate, and that one azure eye catches Equius. You suppress a smirk when he almost stumbles.

"I- yes. I would not make a good fugitive. I will die for my beliefs."

Oh like fuck. "Then you're coming with us bastards, because we are good fugitives."

John moves forward, his hammerhead falling away, the tool turning into a crutch. He reaches out to put his hand on Equius's shoulder, and stands head to head with him. Goddamn giants all around you.

"Come with us. And we'll see if we can find justice."

 

You aren't sure whether to be glad you're conscious. It means you're alive. It also means you have to endure the feeling of your skull splitting to stay focused and translate while you help Equius and Dave figure out how to use an Alternian starchart and navcomp to jump to Earth. You keep losing batches of time, but you can focus when it counts.

You think you're at least out of the initial shock phase, and as much as you would love to just lie there on painkillers, you dial them down by the sixth day in FTL, getting up to the cockpit before you exit the jump into Sol. It's a bit cramped with everyone here, most especially you and Equius, but hey, you're a whole foot skinnier now, makes for a slightly easier fit.

You pop out around 55 AU, just past the Kuiper Belt. You expected some traffic - maybe another of the 23 ISS scout ships, or a semi-annual colony ship.  
You didn't expect a fleet of six ships, each massing six to twelve times as much as this stolen yacht, and letting off enough radiation from their engines and charged weapons to rival the Andean Power Plant (which gives off a couple petawatts and fuels the entire ISS launch system).  
"This is the Earthfleet Battlecruiser _Charlemagne_. Alternian vessel, power down and prepare to be boarded immediately. Attempt any interstellar transmission and you will be instantly destroyed."

"Uh, hi, _Charlemagne_. You don't have to worry us about giving away our stellar location, although really I think it's inevitable that the Alternians will detect our last couple hundred years of transmissions and locate Earth, but- ow, Dave! Sorry, right. This is John Egbert-2(c), formerly of the _ISS Genesis Tracker_ and commanding the joint human/troll rebel captured vessel _Combined Grievance_. I don't know much about any Earthfleet but I think we'd all like to sign up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thus concluding Onset! Future stories in the Troll War series are going to be running in parallel, each focusing on a couple characters and a certain theme.
> 
> Click the double arrow below. Click iiit. You can also read #3, Retrovirus, at the same time. In fact, read it before you finish Progression (but you should probably start Progression first).


End file.
